Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are facing the worst housing crisis in the history of our nation. This is not something that's happened overnight, yet it seems to have taken the government completely by surprise. Their hastily concocted schemes will help so few people into homeownership and have so little impact on skyrocketing rents that we will be hard-pressed to notice the difference. The Greens have put a suite of solid proposals on the table designed to alleviate pressure on both house prices and rents, providing lasting relief to the growing number of Australians struggling with the cost of living. The government has refused to even discuss our proposals. It's refused to negotiate. It's their way or the highway.

As housing prices continue their upward trend, pushing homeownership out of reach for so many young people, more Australians will be renting for longer. The growing number of renters, over 5.5 million, are being faced with a rental desert, pushing rents higher and higher. Those rents are now a major driver of poverty and homelessness. Nowhere in Australia is this more obvious than in my home state of South Australia. Rents in Adelaide are now increasing faster than anywhere else in Australia, with a 60 per cent increase over the last four years. For comparison, Melbourne's rent growth was 41.6 per cent over the same period. Keeping up with steep rent growth like this eats away at households' ability to save for a deposit. Incredibly—and for the first time in history—median house prices in Adelaide have now outstripped Melbourne, rising to $791,000.

But the housing market isn't just tough for renters looking to buy. Many South Australians with mortgages are now struggling to hold onto their homes. Repayments on new home loans in Adelaide are up by almost $2,000 a month since June 2022 based on the median house price. That's a lot of groceries. The reality is that most South Australians do not have an extra $2,000 lying around to help keep up with the growth in their mortgage costs. They are now having to cut back on essentials to make ends meet because their wages are not growing anywhere near as fast. According to the ABS, rents have increased at nearly double the rate of wages over the last year alone. Anglicare's housing snapshot recently found that only 15 per cent of the rentals in Adelaide were affordable for a working couple on minimum wages. If you are receiving income support, the situation is quite impossible. Not a single property in South Australia is affordable for a person on JobSeeker or youth allowance—not a single one.

The housing affordability crisis is pushing those on low incomes into homelessness. This is not an acceptable outcome anywhere, but it is particularly egregious in a country where our government is spending $11 billion a year subsidising coal and gas, $368 billion to build nuclear submarines that we may never get and almost $12 billion every year in housing tax concessions that primarily benefit wealthy investors and developers.

We can afford to fix this. What is the government waiting for? It's all about choice. We need to choose a comprehensive plan to build new affordable homes and to freeze and cap rents, a plan that doesn't make things worse by fuelling even greater demand. Kate, a 61-year-old South Australian woman, wrote to me recently, illustrating her rental struggles. She has been a long-term renter who's experienced some times of financial insecurity through divorce. This is unfortunately a common story for older women, who've often made financial sacrifices to provide valuable but unpaid care work throughout their lives, trusting that, in turn, they'll be supported by those who benefit from that labour. Finding yourself single, without savings or the type of stable job that provides security, at the end of your working life, is devastating. Kate tried to enter the housing market in 2017, but, even with a permanent job, she was turned down. She said, 'I just couldn't compete with folk who made higher offers on the very modest properties for which I had applied.' And now she is facing eviction. Kate told me that the effect of housing insecurity is devastating for her mental health. Her wish is 'that politicians of every stripe hear the stories of women like me'. Thank you for writing to me, Kate. You are right. This place needs to hear more stories from people like you.

Successive governments in this place have ignored people like Kate. They have walked away, for decades, from public housing and turned to the private market to deliver housing. The major parties have introduced tax incentives for investors and developers which cost the public purse billions every year. Major parties have pulled funding from public housing, which saw social housing stock decline by 11 per cent between 2006 and 2020.

It hasn't always been like this. Housing solutions aimed at propping up private investors have not always been the preferred housing policies of governments. The South Australian Housing Trust was arguably the most successful public housing authority in the country, not only providing affordable rental accommodation but helping to house people and get them into homeownership. The Housing Trust was established by Liberal Premier Thomas Playford after the recession of the late 1930s. It wasn't treated as a welfare housing agency; its aim was to provide decent quality homes for workers and their families. The South Australian Housing Trust became a world leader in public housing, building 122,000 high-quality, affordable homes over its 70-year life span, driven by the need to attract investment and manufacturing to the state.

Those days are well and truly gone, sadly. When state governments handed the role of providing affordable housing to the private sector in the eighties, the outcome was entirely predictable. We've seen a long, slow decline in the number and quality of Housing Trust homes and the disappearance of a crucial pathway for low-paid workers to purchase their own homes.

Three decades later, we have over 184,000 families on public housing waiting lists nationwide—4,000-odd in South Australia—with very little prospect of winning the public-housing lottery and nowhere else to go. When you're walking through the South Park Lands on the edge of Adelaide's city, as I do most weekends, you can't help but imagine yourself in the shoes of so many people who are sleeping out in the cold. Losing your home is a frightening prospect, but we are seeing more and more ordinary South Australians slipping through the net.

We need to remember that, in South Australia, Thomas Playford did more than build thousands of affordable homes; he kept the 1945 wartime rent controls in place for many years. He controlled rents, for years. We can do this. A Liberal government did it, for years. They have done it before. And we can do it again, in this extreme crisis.

The Greens have a policy for how to move forward which deals with the feeling of abandonment that so many people feel in the face of this crisis. There is hope. We can do better. We can afford it. But the truth is: we will never tackle the housing crisis until we phase out negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount—the massive tax handouts for property investors: $176 billion over the next decade. That is all wrong. The good news is that, if we wind them back, we can build houses for all. With the money saved from phasing out these big handouts, we could fully fund the Greens' plan to establish a public property developer to build over 600,000 good quality homes.

When did it become radical to fight for a roof over the head of every Australian? When did Labor turn into a party protecting investors over workers and their families? And when did Labor turn into the party that let housing become an asset class rather than an essential human right? Government policy that drives up house prices is a choice, but not one the Greens would make and not one that we need to make as a community. We can make other choices. We can put a roof over everyone's head, and that should be the goal of a comprehensive housing policy in Australia.